Wisconsin Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman has argued that Congress “should do a little more” to help wealthy Americans.
The six-term congressman, 71, a Donald Trump loyalist, spoke up for neglected U.S. elites Thursday during a panel discussion on the economy in Troy, Michigan, with that state’s GOP gubernatorial candidate Rep. John James, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and other officials.
As the conversation pivoted to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July 2025, Grothman insisted the mammoth tax and sending initiative was intended to benefit “the average guy.”
“Don’t let anybody tell you that people running, uh, Congress right now are looking out for the rich,” he said.
“Actually, I think we should do a little more for them, but, you know, right now, uh, we are doing all we can to help the middle class, right?”
“If I was designing a tax cut for the rich, I wouldn’t talk about overtime,” he continued. “I wouldn’t talk about car loans, right? We are aimed at helping the average guy.”
The bill in question was strongly opposed by Democrats – who refused to vote through its cuts to assistance programs for low-income families, including Medicaid and free school meals – with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivering a near-nine-hour filibuster trying to prevent its passage.
It squeaked through anyway, passing the House 218-214 and the Senate 51-50 thanks to a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance, with not a single vote coming from the opposition and two Republican congressmen, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, refusing to back it.
CNN data analyst Harry Enten reported Saturday that Trump’s signature bill has since added $4 trillion to the national debt and ranked government spending as his fourth biggest area of declining support, saying his approval rating on that subject had dropped from 34 percent to just 12 percent.
“A 22 percent drop. Woof!” the commentator remarked, joking that the New York Yankees are more popular in Boston than Trump is trusted with the public purse.
Grothman is up for re-election in November’s midterms against Democratic challenger Brad Smith and is no stranger to controversial public statements.
During Joe Biden’s single term in May 2023, for instance, he complained on the House floor that the 46th president was not nominating enough straight “white guys” to be judges, saying only five of the 97 names he had put forward were caucasian males and that two of those were gay.
When Biden was succeeded by Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race, he suggested that opposition voters felt “they have to stick with her because of her ethnic background."
More recently, he has defended Trump’s now-scrapped “slush fund” to make payouts to alleged victims of “weaponization” by the Department of Justice and, speaking on Newsmax, delivered a Hall of Famer on Iran, declaring: “Sometimes they don’t act like they lost this war.”
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